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Borrowing from the worlds of cycling and aeronautical engineering, the racing wheelchairs hitting the track at London’s World Para Athletics Championships this summer have been meticulously designed down to the finest of details.

Athletes taking part in T51, T52, T53, and T54 events compete using racing wheelchairs. They will all have musculoskeletal impairments including limb deficiency, leg length difference, or conditions impairing range of movement for example spinal chord injury, spina bifida, muscular dystrophy, or amputation.

Huw Roderick, the UK Product manager for top end disability sports equipment at Invacare, who works with athletes and sports associations in developing and designing equipment talks us through the technology helping athletes such as Great Britain’s Hannah Cockroft and Ben Rowlings break records.

Racing wheelchair technology has improved drastically since the first Paralympic games took place in Rome, 1960.Credit:
KUSCHALL

“As athletes get into this sport and start training, building their upper body and ignoring their lower limbs, their body shape changes. With that build up over a couple of years their body position will change meaning they may outgrow their chair.”

Unnatural “sitting" position

“The chair has to be designed for where the athlete’s legs fit. They are normally tucked under the chair very tightly for aerodynamic movement. They are almost in a kneeling position.

“As you’ll see in race position, they’re not looking forward, they’ve got their head down and their shoulders are over the wheel hubs so their arms are like pistons. It's a very difficult position - an able-bodied person trying to do a couple of laps would be incredibly uncomfortable. Your legs, thighs, and your calves would be dead because of the downward pressure on them.”

Hannah Cockroft's in racing position during a training session in Rio, almost kneeling with her feet tucked beneath the chair.Credit:
GETTY IMAGES

Hard sport to get people into

“There is more effort going in to attract young people. It’s a difficult sport to get into because of the body position. If you if you took a Hannah Cockroft chair, gave it to a young person and asked them to try it, they would probably give up quite quickly because it’s such a difficult position.

“We’ve got a chair out now, the first one in a country, where we put an adjustable wheelchair seat that we can tilt forwards or backwards on a racing chair with foot plates so their feet can dangle vertically down and be strapped in so they don’t get in the way.”

Money matters

“A pair of carbon fibre wheels cost £1,500 to £1,800. Only certain teams and athletes are able to afford them. In Rio, two American athletes had chairs made by BMW that cost around £20,000. The teams and people who can afford it will probably be racing in composite metal chairs in the next two or three years.”

“When you’ve got very little muscle in your lower body you’ve got to be very careful you don't injure your legs. A lot of athletes can’t feel their legs so you've got to be very careful putting pressure on them.”

Material

“The metal they use is aeroplane grade aluminium called A7 aluminium. It’s incredibly thin and incredibly lightweight. You need a top aluminium welder to use it.”

Wheel’s aren’t straight and there’s no manual steering

“If you look at the chairs the wheels are sometimes offset, so they’re not all parallel – you have a camber on them.

“The athletes don't steer into a corner because they're still pushing, they hit a mechanism called a compensator. They hit the steering as they go into the corner, i.e. on a 400-meter track or if you're doing a marathon you set it up in a looser way to go around bigger corners – they’re not steering all the way around a corner because they’d lose a lot of speed.”

Working with the world of cycling

“The money spent in the cycling world, with Team Sky, Team GB and all the others, come with hi-tech environments using more and more composite metals – which are all about weight loss. You have rigidity in the frame but you have a very light end product.

“A lot of the wheels you’ll see on display in London are directly taken from the cycle industry but have push rims bolted on. It’s not an industry of making carbon fibre wheels just for wheelchair racing because the industry’s just not big enough.

"Hannah and Ben sometimes train behind the pace machine used in Omnium - the man on the motorbike. They will pick up, drop speed, and do interval training. On the right surface they're hitting 21mph in a straight line."

“You’ll see the use of composites coming in to the chairs, and you’ll also see 3D printing coming in to produce athlete’s one off moulds and bespoke chair parts. The technology involved in the gloves is also very important with new materials being used to provide better purchase on the push rims. 3D printing is being used to produce bespoke gloves for athletes.”

Damage in transit

“The biggest problem is transportation. You do get panics where somebody’s had a damaged chair and all of a sudden you have to rush something for an athlete. That's not unusual. I did it twice before Rio last year and they were top athletes in the UK, they’d come back from training and airlines had smashed up a chair.”

The World Para Athletics Championships are at the London Stadium from July 14-23. Tickets start from £10 for adults and all child tickets (up to 16 years old) are £5. tickets.london2017athletics.com